“Initially we were focused on what they didn't have here. But we came to discover what they did have.”

"Swaahaa..." Jennifer Sundeen, a preternaturally youthful 47-year-old with Stevie Nicks–wild blond hair and a serpentine arm cuff, calls out to a group of 50 local high school girls who sit behind desks at the rural Chitende Secondary School in the Lower Zambezi. “This is what my girls and I say when we bleed every month, to remind ourselves what a blessing it is to be a woman, how powerful we are, and how lucky we are that our bodies cleanse themselves.” While I brace myself for an hour of withering teen scrutiny, Sundeen, a Boston mother of three teenage girls, yoga instructor, and founder of three women and girls’ empowerment groups, prompts them to repeat the Sanskrit mantra. She beams, impervious to the mix of bravado and vulnerability that is the province of adolescence worldwide.

I laugh nervously, a regression to my teen self skulking in the back row of ninth-grade human development class, wondering whether her evocation of lunar cycles and translation of the mantra “the surrender to the divine power of the goddess that lives in everyone” make any sense to them. But something about this guileless brand of American optimism resonates. The room falls quiet once Sundeen explains that each girl is about to receive a pair of “period-proof” Thinx underpants, designed to absorb a day’s worth of menstrual blood. Those who are more fluent in English whisper into their desk-mates’ ears, alternately covering their mouths and giggling in disbelief. After a few moments, the room surges with collective comprehension.

Sitting among the students are my fellow travelers—a group of 20 women led by feminist icon Gloria Steinem, fellow activist and longtime collaborator Amy Richards, and Cherri Briggs, an African travel specialist known for her uncompromising approach to social activism and conservation here in her adopted country of Zambia and elsewhere on the continent. The three have been working together on behalf of women’s advancement for 15 years. For this trip, Richards has put together a group of influential American feminist organizers and fund-raisers to support projects focused on women and girls by visiting a dozen or so cooperatives in the region.

Amid the frisson over the miracle underwear, I look at Steinem sitting quietly, effortlessly chic in an army-green jumpsuit with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. During the course of the weeklong trip, I notice that underpinning her radical activism is a superhuman gift for listening—an ability to recede without disappearing and to speak only when she has something meaningful to say. “Initially we were focused on what they didn’t have here,” Steinem had noted earlier in the week. “But we came to discover what they did have.”

That perspective shift isn’t easy. In a part of the world with limited access to water, where “being on the rag” isn’t just a colloquialism and the lack of privacy around hygiene rituals at school can cloak the monthly ordeal in shame, it isn’t lost on the girls in the room that the Thinx underpants not only eliminate the need for scarce feminine-hygiene products but could mean the difference between finishing high school and dropping out. “Small is big,” I think to myself. Or, as Richards keeps reminding us, “Think small.”

This classroom demonstration is the new face of philanthropic tourism in Africa, a model that combines small-scale private contributions with more traditional bucket-list travel. It’s a formula that’s appealing to a growing number of people looking to go beyond a safari with the guilt-assuaging school visit or hospital tour tacked on. “It’s traveling with a purpose, getting out of your comfort zone and making allies,” explains Richards, a founder of Soapbox, the world’s largest feminist speakers’ bureau, who shapes “conscious travel” itineraries for women and girls similar to this one.

The Chitende Secondary School is the newest of 20 projects serving communities in the Lower Zambezi that are supported by Direct Impact Africa (DIA), founded by Briggs, an American-born ringer for Goldie Hawn in a bush hat, and her husband, Richard Wilson, an ex-military Scotsman who was raised in Zimbabwe. Briggs is also the founder of Explore, Inc., a high-end tour operator that customizes safari adventures throughout the continent. DIA, an inversion of AID, is a by-product of the couple’s 20-year history of living in remote wildlife areas near local villages, as well as the beneficiary of their access to wealthy clients who want to see for themselves where their money is going. Briggs and Richards, longtime collaborators, count on the fact that exposure to the projects will raise awareness of travel as a vehicle for social change. While most of the DIA projects are formed as cooperatives and range from chicken farms and solar-powered organic farms to playgrounds and health clinics, all are self-sustaining and predominantly female-run. “If you educate a woman, you educate a nation” is Briggs’s rallying cry, coined a century ago by a Nigerian educator.

Take the Thinx, which were donated by one of DIA’s board members: The Chitende girls, after receiving their underpants, are cautioned by Sundeen not to share them with anyone. The exchange of blood or semen is particularly relevant given where we are. Of the 1.2 million people over the age of 14 living with HIV in Zambia, an estimated 650,000 are women. But these high school girls are a statistical anomaly: Eighty percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa don’t get past grade school, and half are illiterate. As in so many parts of the developing world, without education and therefore job prospects, girls are often forced to marry as early as 14 to help support (or no longer burden) their families. In many cases, they marry men in their 40s who are under the false impression that a virgin serves as a prophylactic against HIV, despite widespread male philandering. “There’s a lot of misunderstanding here about AIDS and how you get it, how hard it is for a female to transfer it to males,” says Richards of the popular belief that HIV comes from female prostitutes. Of course, it’s the young girls whose husbands refuse to wear condoms despite their multiple partners who are most at risk.

The virtuous circle of education for women is irrefutable: Higher education not only increases job opportunities and financial independence, it also means greater control over reproduction as well as a lower incidence of early marriage and, of course, HIV and AIDS. And it’s the clearest path to combating the systemic misogyny that is literally killing women here. “You have to focus on the people with the least amount of power in order to have equality,” Steinem says at the first of our group’s many evening “talking circles,” a term that could be cloying if not for the fact that, led by Steinem, they can turn the staunchest non-joiner into Kumbaya putty.

It was around one such talking circle eight years ago that Steinem and Briggs formed DIA’s first project, Waka Simba, a women-run chicken farm and tailoring operation, and our first stop. The women dance toward us in a line as we arrive, greeting us with a rhythmic call-and-response whose refrain, I soon realize, repeats the names Amy, Cherri, and Gloria. They are bear-hugged like old friends. We move to a shaded porch, where Briggs speaks with the help of a translator, reminding the group that Waka Simba (“Strong Women” in the Goba language) was formed under a tree next to the Zambezi River. “Remember there were 17 of us, and we sat right over there,” Briggs says, pointing to a field in the distance, “because it wasn’t possible to talk about women’s empowerment in a public place.”

Steinem then recounts the initial meeting at which, after a period of virtual silence, one of the women finally spoke up about how her husband had been beating her. “I thought I had lost my faith in the talking circle for a moment,” Steinem recalls. But eventually a story emerged about a couple of women who had gone to Lusaka for school, run out of money for food, and wound up prostituting themselves and being trafficked, never to return to their village. “We asked these women what would allow them to stay,” Steinem continues, “and they said, ‘If we could grow a crop of maize that was decent, then we’d have enough to feed the community and enough to sell for school fees.’ ” DIA worked with them to figure out what they needed—from chicken feed to solar paneling for irrigation—and helped them identify and train their leaders. The next hurdle was to protect the crops from stampeding elephants. “If you had told me that an electrified fence could prevent sex-trafficking, I wouldn’t have believed it,” says Steinem of money she raised after her first visit. Over three years, Waka Simba has quadrupled the size of its production, while DIA now supports some 3,000 people in 15 co-ops.

Everything we do matters, we just don’t know what it will be. Which is why we need to do things that matter. —Gloria Steinem

Such quiet revelations are DIA’s proof of concept that its grassroots entrepreneurial model—small-scale giving to communities so they learn to sustain themselves—succeeds where traditional philanthropy often fails. Look at some of the big private foundations and NGOs, Steinem says, which will “decide on a solution from 50 miles up in the sky. It doesn’t work. You have to listen. You have to see what people can do on their own and what they want.” It is by listening that DIA can come away from a community with clear direction for what they most need, not what it’s assumed will help in a traditional top-down approach. The itemized wish lists they get after every project range from $90 a year for a woman to attend night school, to $350 for a solar panel, to $15,000 for construction of a new classroom block. That narrows the overwhelming universe of need into bite-size action items that make it all seem doable.

Many of us who have traveled on safari to places like Kenya and Tanzania and have stood somewhat awkwardly before classrooms of singing children can feel the authenticity of encounters like the one we had at Waka Simba. As fellow traveler Jacki Zehner, chief engagement officer of the nonprofit Women Moving Millions, says, “Things will come from this trip.” And not just in quantifiable support for the projects but in the intimacy and camaraderie of traveling for days with a group of ambitious and accomplished women—one who connects musicians with social causes, another whose NGO uses skateboarding as a tool for change in places like Afghanistan—sometimes bumping along dusty unpaved roads for hours at a time, buzzing with inspiration after a visit to an elementary school.

“Everything we do matters, we just don’t know what it will be,” says Steinem, who at 82 still travels like a millennial and speaks in sound bites you want to print and laminate. “Which is why we need to do things that matter.”

Photo by Kate Cunningham

Girls in a classroom doorway at Kacheta Basic School, near Lusaka, the capital.

On our last night at Kiambi Safari Lodge, in a post-dinner talking circle, Aja Pecknold, a New York publicist and manager, replays a scene from a ride earlier that day when we pulled over to pick up three girls no older than ten, two with baby siblings slung around their chests and one with a bowl of dried field mice balanced on her head. Pecknold recalls “the underlying joy of every encounter, even with dried mice,” watching the girls giggle as we hit bumps in the road and they bounced around in the back of the pickup. We all marveled at their levity, laughed at ourselves for worrying about infant car seats. They teased us by holding the bowl of mice close to the window, cracking up when they saw us get squeamish. Suddenly, something Steinem had said earlier in the day hit me: “We all came from Africa, and I’m happy to be coming home.”

I think back to our morning with a group of young girls at Chiawa Primary School, spent talking, reading, and leafing through meticulously kept journals detailing planting cycles, tree species, and local animal behavior in perfect script. Then Indrani Goradia, who runs a Houston-based nonprofit that works to overcome gender violence, had asked each of the girls to stand up, put her hands on her hips, push her chest out, and state her superpower. One nine-year-old, Grace Kwanga, popped up and said, “My superpower is that I’m smart!” Another girl said, “My superpower is I’m good at math.” But more commonly I heard, “My superpower is dancing and singing.” Shortly after, the children broke for recess and started to dance and sing. Watching them pump their arms and thrust their hips, I began to understand how these really are superpowers, the ultimate trifecta of joy, skill, and transcendence. But at the same time that the performance was dazzling, there was also something a little discomfiting about the not-so-subtly-sexual gyrations, even among the youngest girls. It’s clear that sexuality is a central force in this cultural tradition, and the scene presented a paradox for our group of so-called actualized American women who are hell-bent on disentangling sexuality and power. And yet, as we all got pulled into the dance circle, it was those of us who couldn’t quite keep the beat who perhaps felt the least sure of ourselves in that moment.

The idea of women helping women feels particularly timely in the aftermath of an American election that saw 53 percent of white women vote an unapologetic misogynist into our nation’s highest office. Clearly “helping” is a two-way street; we aren’t in a position to take anything for granted. Looking back on our trip, I feel both a greater sense of common ground and a heightened urgency about the safety of women. “We have to look at each other instead of looking up for the answers,” Steinem said when I spoke to her at press time, “and to be the consciousness-raisers worldwide, as the relatively freer women in the world.”

Make It Happen

Cherri Briggs at Explore, Inc. and Amy Richards at Soapbox do similar trips together and separately. To get to Zambia, you’ll fly into Lusaka (via Dubai or Johannesburg), then transfer to lodges in the Lower Zambezi near the DIA projects. Finish up with a safari: Our group did a game drive in South Luangwa National Park.